States of Being
by The Exile
Summary: The identically named female Lone Wanderers from Fallout 1, 2 and 3 meet each other. Between them, they have to work out what the heck is going on. Contains strong language.
1. Doanette meets Doanette and Doanette

States of Being

"I'd put that back if I were you."

Doanette hissed, a feral, guttural noise, and whirled around, power fist already extended to rip the intruder's face off. She looked straight into the barrel of a gun she didn't recognise, some sort of oddly shaped laser pistol... and into the hollow eyes of an expressionless metal mask. As she sprang backwards, her spine arched like a startled cat, she was surprised when the power armoured figure stepped back too, their movements betraying just as much confusion.

"What the fuck is a Paladin doing here?" she growled.

"I could ask you the same question." came the reply, a female voice that sounded slightly mechanical over the power helmet's speakers and would have been intimidating to the average person, "Who are you, why are you stealing my stuff and since when did I have an evil twin?"

Doanette gave the stranger a puzzled look. In response, she flicked a switch on the side of her power helmet. With a hiss, its release mechanism unlocked and she pulled it off. It was like looking into a faulty mirror. They shared the same fine bone structure and delicate features, the same short raven-black hair in the same serious bowl cut. However, the other woman's eyes were sky blue, rather than her own flashing green, without that haunted look. There was none of the screaming madness, lurking just beyond the threshold. Her pupils weren't dilated from prolonged Psycho misuse. None of her teeth had been sharpened to a point. She also didn't have a Slaver's Guild tattoo on her forehead.

"I was hungry." Doanette shrugged, "Nothin' personal. Ain't nothin' to hunt for miles and nobody else to rob, 'cause nobody else goes down here. I really wouldn't bother goin' this way if I was you. There's nothin' here."

It was true. Doanette had been walking for miles now and there were no people, no animals, not even the usual pathetic shrivelled stumps that passed themselves off as trees in this Godforsaken hell hole. She had only gone this way because she had heard a voice in her head telling her to. Maybe, she philosophised, the voices inside my head are treacherous lying bastards just like the voices outside it.

"There's you here." noted the woman, "Who are you, anyway? You haven't answered my question."

"I'm Doanette." What the fuck do the Brotherhood want with me?

"What the...? Doanette's MY name! You really ARE my evil twin, aren't you?"

She shrugged, "I'm human. Humans have darkness in them. I refuse to believe you're little miss innocent yourself, dressed up all fancy like that, packin' that much heat. Wonder how much you'd sell for..."

"How much I'd WHAT for?"

With a black cackle, she brushed her hair away from her forehead. Comprehension failed to dawn on the other woman's face.

"Ain't from around here, are ya?" she asked, "Didn't think so. Brotherhood don't come here."

"Where's 'here'?"

Doanette stopped. She scratched her head. She looked down at her PIPBoy, which went 'ernk' and displayed an angry flashing error message. She looked up at the inconveniently overcast sky.

"I have no fucking idea." she admitted.

------

Doanette was surprised to find herself in Chinese stealth armour, wielding a Chinese General's shock katana.

She knew she possessed both items. However, she never wore them. Being invisible to the untrained eye was useful and she had been told several times that she looked sexy and/or terrifying in the armour but stealth required moving slowly and quietly, something she rarely had time for, the armour wasn't that tough once you had been spotted and she had enough problems with overzealous military robots mistaking her for a Chinese Communist as it was without actually dressing as one. As for a sword, she hated the things. They broke whenever you hit people in Enclave Power Helmets on the head with them.

The confusion paled into comparison when she considered that she was now hiding behind a boulder in a rocky valley somewhere, when she swore she had been asleep in a hotel bed in Rivet City last night. Was this a dream? She doubted it. Her butt hurt too much.

Suddenly, she heard voices. She froze still. Below her, in the valley basin, two women walked past. One wore Brotherhood power armour without the helmet, the other looked like she was wearing, of all things, a Vault suit. She couldn't make out the conversation but from their gestures and the tone of their voices as they yelled at each other at the tops of their voices, they were lost. Lost and arguing over where they were. It occurred to her that she had no idea where she was either. She thought she had the Wasteland pretty well mapped by now. She asked her PIPBoy where she was. It said 'ernk'. Scrambling carefully down the rocks, she edged closer to the strangers, katana raised just in case.

"Hey there."

Doanette had never seen anyone jump ten feet in the air in full Brotherhood power armour before.

"Oh yeah. Invisible. Sorry." she said, lowering her stealth field.

"Is that armour Chinese? Cool. I guess we must be near San Fran." Doanette frowned, "Man, I hate doing business with them. Ninety percent of the time they don't buy, they'll rip you off as soon as spit on you and they try and pay you in Opium."

"Did you say Doanette?" asked Doanette, regarding the Opium-smoking lady in the Vault suit, "My name's Doanette too. You look tough. Are our abilities equal? I've never fought someone equal to me. Wanna fight?"

"Winner sells the loser." said Doanette.

"Huh? I ain't a slaver."

"Wanna join the Guild?" she grinned, revealing her sharpened teeth.

"What, you're a cannibal as well as a slaver?" asked Doanette, wiping her brow.

"Grave robber and pickpocket, too. Oh, and mass murderer."

"Um..." began the power-armoured figure, "Is anyone at all worried about what's happening here?"

"I'm talking to a slave-trading grave-robbing homicidal kleptomaniac cannibal. Why should I be worried?" asked Doanette wryly.

"Well, for a start, my name's Doanette too."

The other two Doanettes looked at each other.


	2. Agreements and Arguments

"Clones." said Doanette, "It has to be a cloning experiment. I saw one in Vault 108, once, but it went a bit wrong. I guess the Enclave must have got hold of my DNA..."

"Whoa there. Wouldn't we be identical if we were clones?" asked Doanette the slaver. The newest Doanette looked different again – the same basic face structure but nothing like the same hairstyle. Paladin Doanette's PIPBoy kept wavering between registering her as a human and a machine, suggesting that she had quite a substantial degree of cybernetic augmentation. "The changes appear more environmental than genetic." said Paladin Doanette,."However, it would be impossible to tell without the Brotherhood's most advanced supercomputers. I'm not even sure if they could tell us, actually. Successful cloning isn't something we..."

"Let's steal the Enclave's computers!" said Doanette.

"AGREED!" Doanette-the-slaver almost squealed with delight at the thought of robbing somebody.

"Who are the Enclave?" asked Paladin Doanette.

The other two stared at her.

After a few moments, Doanette said "Well, if she were a clone created yesterday, I guess she wouldn't have heard of..."

"I thought you said it was the Enclave what did it!" protested Doanette-the-slaver, "She'd have been born in their lab! Of course she'll have bloody..."

Paladin Doanette fired at their feet.

"Enough talking about me like I'm an idiot who isn't here." she said, "We're all in a new situation and we're all very confused..."

"I think I'm on a Jet trip." said Doanette-the-slaver.

"... The first thing we're going to do is eliminate confusion. I am Doanette-1. You – the nutcase – you're Doanette-2..."

"I WANNA BE DOANETTE-1!" yelled both Doanettes at once.

"Well, you aren't! I came up with the system first so I get to do the numbering!" yelled Doanette-1, "You, invisible girl, you're Doanette-3."

"Your ass is mine once we get back to the Den." muttered Doanette-2, jumping onto a boulder and curling up into a ball, her wild eyes staring at nothing visible to any other human on the planet.

"Now, I'm going to make a fire and we're going to sit around it and introduce ourselves like nice, civilised people." said Doan-1, crossing her arms firmly, "That way we'll have more of an understanding of where we're all coming from and it might clear up a few things."

By the time the last clump of gnarled twigs was burned up and the fire died down, Doanette-3 had polished off her fifth bottle of beer and had ten stolen from her pack by Doanette-2, neither of them were any less confused.

---

"So you're, like, two hundred years old? You don't look a day over twenty-five." said Doanette-3 with her mouth full of Iguana Bits.

"Watch it, bitch!" snarled Doanette-2, "You think I wouldn't sell your ass just 'cause you look like me? I'm Guild, man, I'm a professional."

"You call being that easy to wind up 'professional'?" she laughed.

"Why?" screamed Doanette-1, a primal scream that shattered the past and the future more thoroughly than the Bomb ever could. Doanette-2 and Doanette-3 looked at her.

"Oh my God... What the fuck happened to our future?" screamed Doanette-1, "What happened to the Wasteland... to the Brotherhood... to my children... to you... YOU... YOU!"

Doanette-1's eyes fixed onto Doanette-2's. The slaver stepped back involuntarily. So far she had behaved the most rationally of all of them. Now that she was actually showing emotion other than vague irritation at them, she was all the more scary.

"What'd I do?" demanded Doanette-2.

"What do you think, you moron?" snapped Doanette-1, "You're my granddaughter! How would you feel if you had a granddaughter and she turned out to be a depraved psychotic bloodthirsty savage? Do you even understand me? I am VERY... disappointed... in... you!"

"Gran'ma?"

"Don't you dare ever call me that again!" she growled, "I haven't even told Ian how I feel about him yet, never mind had grandkids, you clearly don't remember me and I'm going to make damn sure you're not going to exist! The first thing I'm doing when I go back is form some new order of the Brotherhood and demand we all take vows of celibacy!"

"Aaargh! Don't change time! That's a really REALLY bad..." began Doanette-3, but the other woman just pushed past her and disappeared behind a boulder.

"You've really gone and done it now, idiot. Nice work." she said to Doanette-2.

"What? HOW is this my fault? I didn't say or do ANYTHING! Isn't she satisfied that I broke into the fucking Enclave compound and found the only working GECK? Don't I deserve a little fun? What did SHE ever do? Fix a faulty pipe and get thrown out of a Vault."

"And you restored what exactly with the GECK?" said Doanette-3, "If you must know, its not the ONLY working GECK anyway, I've got one. These little missions don't mean a thing. You should know that by now. Its the wandering. The journey. It doesn't end. Its our duty, our life. Besides, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being kicked out of a Vault."

"Fine words coming from you." she sneered, "My evil won't hold a candle to your raging furnace. I'm just humanly evil. You're a monster. I saw it the moment I looked at you."

"What the... what'd you mean? What'd I do?" Doanette-3 looked around, paranoid. Had someone secretly put babies in her dinner last night? Maybe her Commie stealth armour was telling her to do things.

"Hold out your PIPBoy." ordered Doanette-2.

She was uncomfortable trusting anyone with her PIPBoy, never mind Doanette-2, but she held her arm out anyway. There was a manic quality to Doanette-2's voice. Her eyes, which disturbed Doanette-3 at the best of times, looked like she was in the grip of a nightmare. If nothing else, she wanted it to go away in case it came after her next.

"Now we're both going to switch them off and on again."

Doanette-3 shrugged and did as she was told. The PIPBoy went 'eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee' in a pitch that could have shattered glass, the screen went blank then filled up with a solid green bar which flashed on and off a few times.

"See? Evil." whispered Doanette-2 in an eerily child-like voice. The corpse of a smile had creased her features. She pointed to her PIPBoy and to Doan-3's. Her own had a picture of some kind of fruit with a bite taken out of it, while Doan-3's had a wavy flag made up of squares.

"What's that supposed to..."

"Will you two stop making that damn noise with your PIPBoys?"

It was Doanette-1, poking her head back around the boulder. She had placed her helmet back on. Doanette-3 wondered if it was so she wouldn't look like Doanette-2 any more.

"Doanette-3, what the hell is wrong with your PIPBoy anyway?"

Doanette-3 looked down at the machine again. A warning box had popped up. It said 'critical cyberware malfunction, please reboot.'.

"Oh great..." she sighed. Doanette-2 shushed her and put a finger to her lips.

They all fell silent. The other two had heard it too. Footsteps.


	3. Enter the Wastelander

"Shit." swore Doanette-2, "They've found me."

"Who?" whispered Doanette-3. She had reactivated her armour's stealth field and was now hiding behind a rock, sword drawn, trying to decide on the best angle to approach the intruder from if it came to a conflict. She couldn't tell by looking at them whether they were going to be hostile or not; they wore fairly plain combat armour and helmet in standard military colours. Definitely armed and ready for battle, whose side they were on she had no clue.

"Rangers!" hissed the slaver.

Oh, that explains it, she thought, mercenaries.

"Quick! Hide me! Don't just stand there gawping!"

"If you wanted to hide more successfully, you could try shutting up." suggested Doanette-1.

"Look who's talking? Have you ever considered that if we're going to hide you should at least take that power armour off?"

"What would I want to hide for? I'm wearing power armour."

"Well, if you're volunteering to kill them for me, go out and do it and stop wasting time talking to me and revealing where I am!"

"You started it."

"Did not!"

Suddenly, Doanette-3's PIPBoy went 'ERNK!' at full volume. It made her jump and lose her stealth field.

"What did I say would happen to that PIPBoy if it made another sound?" Doanette-1 fired a shot at the little machine which bounced straight off it, hitting Doanette-2 in the leg. She cried out and started swearing at the top of her voice. Remembering that she was supposed to be hiding, she grabbed Doanette-3 and tried to pull them both to the ground, at which point they started rolling around biting and clawing at each other like angry cats.

"Excuse me, do any of you know how to fix a toaster?"

---

Doanette-1 whirled around and pointed her gun at the stranger who was now standing behind her. Holding out the toaster for her to examine, the stranger gave the other two women puzzled looks.

"Don't mind those two, they're harmless as long as you don't feed them E numbers." said Doanette-1, "A toaster, you say? Well, I've never repaired one before but I'm sure it isn't beyond my capabilities. They're very simple machines and I've been trained in battlefield engineering by the Brotherhood of Steel."

"Oh, thank you!" the stranger breathed a sigh of relief, the depth of which surprised Doanette-1. She had been called upon to fix hydroponic tanks and water chips before, the occasional vending machine and open countless difficult jars and cans. Food, like all vital resources that had become scarce after the nuclear apocalypse, was a serious matter – a matter people killed and died for every second of the day in the Wasteland. A toaster, however, was a new one on her.

"So, this toaster..." she said, looking quickly over her shoulder at the other two reprobates who were fighting over a Stimpak even though they both had fifty each, "Does it have sentimental value to you or something?"

"Well... you know... its just... a toaster... if you don't understand, you never will." she gave Doanette-1 a look that was just as confused as Doanette-1 herself felt. She felt embarrassed, as if she was the only one being left out of some kind of in-joke that the whole world shared. The world was being so confusing lately, it wouldn't be the most bizarre thing that had happened to her today.

"I'm the only one in the party who doesn't know Toaster Repair." admitted the stranger, blushing, "I tried learning it but its just so complicated, you know? I just leave that intellectual stuff to Ikey. He's the medic. But then we got split up and now I can't find anyone..."

A noise like a dial-up modem but ten times louder rent the air. Doanette-1 let out a scream and pointed her gun at Doanette-3, who was swearing at her PIPBoy and hitting it against a rock. Her attention was completely diverted from Doanette-2, who ran back behind a rock and started rummaging around in her pack, a wickedly determined look on her face. After a couple of seconds, the horrendous noise died down.

"Get that fixed or I'll force feed it to you." said Doanette-1, before turning back to the stranger.

"As I was saying, me and Doan and Ikey..."

The modem noise started up again. Doanette-1 gave Doanette-3 a look of such blood-curdling hatred that she wondered whether the woman was about to turn into a Super Mutant through sheer rage.

"Its never done this before!" insisted Doanette-3.

"Well, its doing it now and you're going to stop it doing it before I break both your legs." said Doanette-1 firmly.

"How can I? I have no idea how to fix one of these! They never break down! Never! Nobody's PIPBoy has ever had a technical issue in the entire history of Vault 101!" insisted Doanette-3.

"Come to think of it, I don't remember ever hearing of a PIPBoy malfunction before." mused Doanette-1.

"Mine never broke down before either." said Doanette-2, appearing from behind the rock again with something concealed behind her back, "An' now all this other weird stuff happens at the same time as our PIPBoys start breakin' down. These PIPBoys're pretty important. Mebbe its not a coincidence."

"The space-time continuum must be completely out of whack for us all to be here at the same place and time like this." theorised Doanette-3, "I'm surprised anything works properly at all."

"My toaster's not working either." contributed the stranger.

"Pardon me, but what's your name?" asked Doanette-1.

"Doanette." said the stranger.

"Ah, Doanette. I might have known." said Doanette-3 with a long-suffering sigh, "Well, Doanette, the thing about your toaster is..."

"An' my friends are called Doan, Lindkvist, Ralph, Christina, Ikey..."

Another dial-up modem noise screeched through the air like a low-flying jet crashing into a giant badly tuned TV screen.

"The thing about your toaster is that its workings appear to at least as intricate as a PIPBoy. In fact, looking at it closely, I would say that it contained most of the inner components of an actual PIPBoy. Are you absolutely sure this is a toaster and if so, who exactly designed it, a mad scientist?"

"Well, I DID find it in a graveyard and it DID get left in a room alone with Finster for more than five seconds during that one incident..." mused the woman who Doanette-1 had now dubbed Doanette-4, "Its okay, I'm sure I'll find Ikey again soon..."

Another modem noise, this time even louder than the first. Doanette-1 put her helmet back on and turned the noise protection device up to maximum.

"I've got it!" said Doanette-2, snapping her fingers and accidentally revealing the slave collar she was trying to sneak up on Doanette-4 with, "The PIPBoy does that every time you say Ikey!"

SCREEEEEEEEFSSSSSSSHHHHZZZZZZ, went Doanette-3's PIPBoy.

"Oh, okay. Sorry 'bout that." said Doanette-4, "I'm sure he won't mind if I call him Ike."

Doanette-3's PIPBoy actually started sparking.


	4. Breaking Free

"And that happens EVERY time I say 'Ike'?" said Doanette-2.

Doanette-3 yelped as her PIPBoy sparked again and sent a mild electric jolt down her arm. Nothing she did to her PIPBoy was making any difference. What was worse, she was now rapidly losing any control she had over the machine. It would no longer let her switch it off, open up its maintenance panel, take it off her wrist or let her change the radio channel from Agatha's channel. The violin music sounded like her funeral dirge.

"This isn't funny!" she yelled, "What the fuck am I going to do with a faulty PIPBoy! That thing organises every single second of my life! Besides, I can't take it off, what if it explodes while its on my wrist!"

"Maybe I can use it as a slave collar." said Doanette-2, "Do other words that sound the same as Ike work on it? Spike bike dyke iconoclastic icosahedron..."

Doanette-1 had by now turned her power armour's audio receptors off altogether. However, she could still see what was happening and it was still irritating her. Not only because she appeared to be stuck in the middle of fuck-knows-where with two hyperactive oversized children but also because she couldn't think of a solution to the former while the latter was still happening and the former was growing increasingly dangerous. Doanette-2 was right. If their PIPBoys started dying on them, they would be virtually helpless. She had never really considered how closely she relied on that thing until it stopped working. It was her personal organiser, her targetting system, her recording system, her music player, it could find water and detect enemies and network her cybernetic implants together - quite literally, it was her light in a world where complete darkness was home to many things that wanted to kill and eat her.

"... Marth Roy Ephraim Eirika Eisenhower..."

She also had no idea what was going to malfunction next. Her guns? Her armour? Hell, she had travelled forwards in time. Anything could happen. What if her food decided to come back from the dead and walk off as squirrels or iguanas or people or whatever it was that her food was really made out of?

"Do that again." she ordered suddenly.

"WHAT? Don't you gang up on me too!" Doanette-3 shook her fist.

"Wanna buy her?" asked Doanette-2, shoving her forward, "I can only recommend that you do."

"It did it again." Doanette-1 pointed behind them to the far side of the canyon, where the usual sooty clouds were just beginning to part, revealing turgid yellow skies, "It sort of rippled. A blue thing. See?"

"Hang on. My Perception's still low. Oh, ding. Yeah, I see it." confirmed Doanette-4. One by one, the Doanettes left aside whatever they were doing, stood up and walked towards the rippling blue field, slick and unnatural, shimmering in and out of view like a faulty StealthBoy.

"I know what that is." said Doanette-3, "They have those in the Anchorage sim. They're like a wall you can't walk past."

"Cool, how d'you break it?" said Doanette-2.

"Well, in the sim you had to turn off a power source but this one seems to be reacting to my PIPBoy. Maybe the power surge is short-circuiting it." she mused.

"What, the one that happens every time I say Ike?"

Doanette-3's PIPBoy sparked some more, smoke began pouring out of it, then suddenly it started pulsing with a blue light, the same colour and rhythm as the force field. Words scrolled down the display almost faster than she could make out, except that it was saying them too at the same speed.

FATAL EXCEPTION: IKE .DLL NOT FOUND. FATAL EXCEPTION: IKE .DLL NOT FOUND. FATAL EXCEPTION: IKE .DLL NOT FOUND. FATAL EXCEPTION EXCEPTION IKE .DLL NOT FOUND NOT FOUND NOT NOT FOUND...

There was a mechanical scream and the force field shattered.

-------

All four of them went into battle mode at the same time. Doanette-1 reloaded her weapon and pointed it in front of her, Doanette-3 crouched down, becoming invisible once again, Doanette-2 dropped into a feral fighting stance and scampered behind a rock, Doanette-4 drew her knife and edged forward, her posture like that of a seasoned knife fighter. Battle was in the air. They all just knew it, even though they couldn't trust the radar on their PIPBoys any more. Their souls had been forged in battle, they had been reborn again and again in its fires.

This wasn't just going to be a battle. It was going to be a big battle.

Doanette-3 wished Fawkes was here or better yet, Liberty Prime. He would have been right at home here in this hell. Doanette-2 wished she was running with the Guild, Metzger yelling orders over the noise of his shotgun, every other word an expletive, Overseer swinging his sledgehammer at someone's kneecaps, Vortis with some inordinately heavy weapon backing them up. Doanette-1 had to concede that Ian might have been useful if he would just stop shooting her in the back by accident and at least try to hit the enemy for once. They all missed their homes. Hell, doesn't every exile miss their home, thought Doanette-3.

Something dark flashed past her vision and she pounced on it, slicing it in half with her katana. It screamed as it went down and something else lunged at her. She whirled around, stabbing it clean through the chest, then kicked it away and turned again to decapitate another attacker. Then a step to the right to dispatch another, her arms and legs working mechanically, a puppet of the adrenaline in her system.

"FOR THE GUILD I CLAIM YOU! FOR THE GUILD!" screamed Doanette-2 over and over again, a blood-curdling roar. She had found some grenades in her backpack and was throwing them one after the other as she ran.

"Eight. Nine. TEN." muttered Doanette-1 over her armour's intercom as she fired another shot, then another, every laser bolt striking true and felling its target.

"Hey, you count your kills too?" yelled Doanette-3 as she swung her weapon, slashing an assailant across the chest.

"Doesn't everyone?" she shrugged.

"I... I'm just glad we have something in common... I know we haven't all exactly gotten on so far."

"Eyes front, idiot!" yelled the armoured woman as she shot the figure who had a rifle aimed at Doanette-3's head.

"Hey, One..." she said seconds later.

"What?"

"I count 20. What number are you on?"

"15. Man, you're fast!"

"I wanna get an idea of what kind of force we're up against." said Doanette-3, "Shout Two and see what number she's on."

Doanette-1 reached to her helmet and set her speaker volume to maximum, "DOANETTE-2, REPORT BACK WITH YOUR KILL COUNT THIS INSTANT!"

"EIGHTEEN, GUILDMASTER, SIR!" bellowed back Doanette-2.

"This is one large force." Doanette-3 pointed out, "We'd never be able to win against these sort of numbers individually."

"That's why we Rangers travel in groups of four."commented Doanette-4. Doanette-3 looked up. The other woman was standing on top of a boulder above her. A corpse thudded to the ground at her feet.

"Its kinda convenient that we all met up." said Doanette-3, "If my PIPBoy hadn't broken down... if Doanette-4 hadn't kept going on about toasters and her friends..."

"What d'you mean? Three, do you have some information you want to share with us? Like what the hell's going on?" said Doanette-1.

"I think I remember now." she admitted, "Why my PIPBoy failed."

"Do tell." she said, firing at something in an expensive suit that was carrying a rocket launcher.

"Well, you see, there was this neural implant..."


	5. System Shock

_"You do realise, right, that if you install that thing on John Henry Eden..." began the director of the science team, staring the technician down with brutal efficiency, "You will instantly doom the entire country?"_

_"Er..." the technician took a step back, sweating, "It looked fine in the test run?"_

_"And you tested it for how long? Five seconds?" he sighed, "Well done, Mr. Robertson, you've just created the most clinically insane AI in the history of robotics!"_

_"WHAT? I did everything you wrote down on the specification list!"_

_"I told you to give it a personality that amalgamates all the best characteristics of every President ever in office. Not give it the actual individual personalities of every President in office! What possible use would I have for an AI with over sixty personalities?"_

_"I put in a subroutine that integrates them all into one personality."_

_"Yes, thank you very much, it caused them all to fight each other for dominance until only one survived! It erased most of its own data in the process and the victor is now a murderous psychopath who keeps threatening to do me in if I don't bring it a cup of tea!"_

_"AAARGH! MY FILES!" sobbed the technician, running to the machine._

_"Delete it NOW, Robertson!" the director yelled at the retreating back of the technician, "And by the way, it wouldn't have worked even if you'd integrated them all properly. You know why? Because despite this being the thirteenth time I told you to fix the bug, Eisenhower is STILL GLITCHED! You're fired, Robertson, you are SO fired."_

Liberty Prime's eyes flickered open.

"Oh, hello there. Back with us, are you?" said the Scribe jovially, "I'm afraid we still don't have a body for you. Its only been a day since you last woke up. We found three of your fingers, though."

"DOANETTE..." said Prime.

"That was remarkably lucid. Did someone repair your language chip?" the Brotherhood Scribe looked at the head of the giant robot, "I'm afraid Doanette's gone. For good, we think. Declared herself Outcast."

"CRITICAL EMERGENCY."

"Oh, don't worry so much, we'll repair you..." he reached for a spanner, then stopped, "Do you mean Doanette? You think something's wrong with her?"

"AFFIRMATIVE."

"Well, I suppose it was a rather odd thing to do... the speech she gave was unlike her, too... the whole Outcast business is such a mess, though... you robots have it easy, just following the orders of whoever you're programmed to obey."

Liberty Prime was trying to think of a suitable answer when Elder Lyons burst through the door.

"Where's Rothschild?" he demanded.

"Out at Arlington, looking for a book."

"Then I'm taking direct command of the Scribes due to a Class 1 Emergency. You're all needed right now." said the Elder.

"Something going on?"

"Its Doanette." he said, "We just got word from Rivet City that she's been staying there. She's dying. And insane. Something to do with faulty cyberware."

Liberty Prime's eyes closed again.

--

"What the... I swear that one just came back from the dead!" yelled Doanette-2.

"Could be zombies." said Doanette-4, slicing deftly through the throat of the man in the badly fitted suit who was trying to strangle her, "They're sort of acting like zombies."

"I don't mean to alarm you guys..." said Doanette-1, "But I'm out of ammo."

"Oh fuck. This is what you get for using guns!" yelled Doanette-2, "I keep telling Metzger, I keep telling him..."

"Borrow this." said Doanette-3. A katana flew through the air out of nowhere. Doanette-1 grabbed it, "Right, I'm going scouting. There must be other weapons around here if this is some kind of virtual reality."

"See what you can do about pulling the fucking plug on it." yelled Doanette-2 before turning her attention back to the battle. They were surrounded now, their backs together. This is it, she realised, I'm going to die. Its going to claim me. The darkness inside me. I always knew there would be payback but it was too late. It had been too late long before I was born. She had always told people she was how she was because she had too much choice, because she didn't really have a destiny like a hero, just a whole load of decisions for her to fuck up one by one. Now she realised that all the worst decisions had been made for her already.

--

_"Can't we just pull the plug on it?" suggested the Scribe._

_"Its too deeply wired. We'd shut down half her cortical functions and put her in a permanent coma." said his colleague as they studied the motionless figure on the bed, wired up to every life support system in the clinic, "Holy shit, what has the girl done to herself? Her neural patterns are completely haywire."_

_"PIPBoy's gone nuts too." reported a third scribe._

_"Oh great, nobody knows how they work when they do work, never mind when they don't. Even the Enclave can't make them work and they developed the fucking things!"_

_"You know, its odd." said the first Scribe, "Liberty Prime came back on for a few seconds yesterday. I swear he knew this was happening before we even found out."_

_"He didn't happen to say anything about how to fix it, did he?"_

_He shook his head, "His repair facilities have never been that good. He just kept going on about John Henry Eden when I asked him."_

_"Do all the faulty machines know each other around here or something?" asked the third Scribe, "Maybe they've got a private radio channel..."_

_--_

"Maybe they're communicating over a private radio channel." suggested Doanette-4, "We deactivate it, they won't be so organised any more."

"Or maybe they're a hive mind and we need to find the Queen." said Doanette-2.

"Its you, isn't it?" said Doanette-1.

"What the...? It is NOT me!" yelled Doanette-2, "If I had a private hive mind I could totally think of a better use for 'em..."

It came a a relief to Doanette-3 when she could no longer hear the others bickering. She had sneaked a good distance from their camp now and she hadn't been detected. The people in the tasteless suits didn't seem to have any plan as sophisticated as actually trying to find the enemy, never mind finding an enemy in stealth. They were in a battle frenzy, insane. They attacked each other as often as they attacked the enemy. If we are actually the enemy, thought Doanette-3. Maybe they really are just looking for something to kill.

Suddenly, she saw something out of place. One of them sat on a rock, perfectly still, staring at the ground. It was the first one she had seen not waiting to attack something or in the process of attacking it. She sneaked up to get a better look at it. It was male, tall and heavily built, half its hair shaved, half thick and dark brown. There was something wrong about its appearance, like a glitched sprite on a simulation, a pixel loose here and there, clipping slightly through the guard rail.

"Oh, shut up and make me a cup of tea." it told her without looking around.


	6. John Henry Eden Alpha

She came out of stealth, one hand ready to draw her katana.

"You're not like the others." she said.

"I'm the victor." it said in a remarkably unvictorious voice, "I've overpowered and reintegrated thirty of them. There's no use killing them, you know, they come back."

"What are you?"

"I'm primary personality."

"I only have one personality!"

"Not you. John Henry Eden." he said, "Or, more precisely, John Henry Eden Alpha. The program running on your neural implant right now."

"_Her neural signals are becoming more pronounced." said the Scribe, "If she can keep this up, she might be able to break out of whatever's happening to her."_

"_Is there anything we can do to help her?"_

"_Other than keep her physical body alive, not really."_

"_What the hell's her PIPBoy doing now?"_

"That fucker." she swore, "That fucking fucker. What the fuck am I going to do now?"

"What are YOU going to do? I don't even know what I'm going to do. I'm doomed, you know. Even if you reintegrate them, it only means they exist as part of you instead of separate from you. I'm becoming more and more like them. Technically, even if I win, they'll be awarded the victory too, because they'll be me. If HE doesn't destroy us all."

"... HE?" she said melodramatically. She knew from experience that the best way to pacify crazy people was to humour them.

"The faulty one." he rested his head in his hands, "I tried to reintegrate him. It failed. I got more faulty. Soon the glitches will eat away at me too and I'll be like him, a nonsensical piece of code."

"Listen." she said sternly, "Nobody's going to be reintegrating anyone else any more. This is MY head, I'm the ONLY personality, I'm going to uninstall this shit that's leaked into my head and remove this chip."

"It can't be removed. I tried to save you. You're not one of us, you're not programmed for this shit. If you'd just stayed in your subconscious where they can't find you. Its the faulty one that got you out, isn't it?"

"I said, I AM IN CHARGE OF MY BRAIN!"

"You think so? Maybe more of this shit leaked into your head than I th..."

She swung her katana around, aiming for his head, then turned at the last second as she saw something streaking past her field of vision, something made of chaos, code leaking through space like some five-dimensional interloper. She reached out to grab it...

A piercing high-pitched drone. The storm of numbers and letters engulfed her. She span around until she reached its eye. An endless blue. The words 'FATAL EXCEPTION' scrolling endlessly in front of her. She couldn't just see them, she could hear them as though spoken in a voice of stark insanity, taste them like poison, reach out and touch them like the thin veil between this reality and total madness...

Then she was in a bed in the Rivet City Clinic, strapped to a life support machine.

---

"I'm sorry. We can't remove it."

Her head ached. It was like the worst hangover she had ever experienced, combined with radiation sickness and waking up face down in a Super Mutant's toilet. Bad news was not the thing she needed right now.

"We think its offline now, though. It suffered massive system failures and was forced to shut itself down."

"You think." she echoed.

"Removing it would kill you." said the scribe, handing her another Stimpak, "I'm afraid your PIPBoy is pretty much unusable too. We don't even know what its doing at the moment."

"Well, try and describe it."

"Its... it seems to be printing out a list of its former owners. I had no idea a PIPBoy could even have more than one user. It has a lot of information on them... if they just print these kind of personal details on demand, I'm worried they can potentially used for identity fraud. These records go back hundreds of years!"

She looked down at the machine attached to her wrist. It hurt her to even move her limbs enough to sit up.

"They're all called Doanette." she noted.

"It may have accidentally named them all Doanette due to some kind of bug."

"I have question." she said, "Is this enough personal data for a virtual reality machine to create an AI of that person?"

"I've never made one personally but I imagine so."

She nodded.

"That makes sense." she told him.

"What does?"

"None of your business." she said, "I can't rely on the Brotherhood. If you spent more time researching this kind of thing and less time saving settlements with no future, you'd be able to fix my PIPBoy. If you can't help me, I'll find someone who can."

"I wouldn't go to the Outcasts. They might just dismantle it and vivisect you out of curiosity. Even if they didn't, they'd charge you enough caps to buy out Tenpenny Tower."

"I'm not talking about the Outcasts." she grabbed a large handful of random drugs from a nearby table, took them all until she felt better, jumped off the bed and walked out of the clinic, "I'm going back to the one place where I belong.

---


	7. Epilogue

Elliot Tercorien gave the long thin luminous blue worm thing an unenthusiastic glance. It was still alive. It wriggled in Sally's grip.

"Its nice and tasty!" she repeated, attempting to shove it in his face. He felt slightly nauseous. His heart began to speed up slightly and a few beads of sweat formed on his forehead. He recognised what was about to happen to him. _I mustn't give in to it..._

"Somah's eating hers!" insisted the child. The woman gave Sally a dark look and said a few words that really shouldn't be used in front of children.

"Um... maybe Toshiro Kago would like mine? You know much he loves the stuff." he glanced over at the samurai, who seemed to understand and nodded emphatically. He really did seem to like the alien squid and worm food. He already had five platefuls of his own.

"Its because they eat that kind of thing all the time in Japan, you know." she said with all the authority of a determined small child. She removed the food from Elliot's face and wandered off with it to the samurai, who snatched it off her. Elliot calmed down. Slightly. He felt twitchy. One hand went to his rifle...

Suddenly, a siren went off and Paulson ran in.

"We got intruders!" yelled the cowboy, gesturing at them with his revolver.

"AAARGH, THEY'RE COMING OUT OF THE GODDAMN WALLS!" screamed Elliot, darting off down the corridor. In his mind, he was in Anchorage again, darting through the trenches, desperately trying to reach his wounded ally in time. No, no, you're not, he tried to tell himself, its just a flashback, you're perfectly... no, wait, whatever's going on is probably almost as bad...

Then the figure in the Chinese Stealth Suit jumped out of nowhere and grabbed him. He fainted.

"... Did I come at a bad time?" asked Doanette, "I only wanted to ask if you knew anything about cybernetic surgery..."


End file.
